Re: Problems with AOL imap accounts

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 20:05 +0200, Sergio Villar Senin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> there were some fixes regarding AOL IMAP server:
> http://www.tinymail.org/trac/tinymail/changeset/3674
> http://www.tinymail.org/trac/tinymail/changeset/3675
> 
> but they seem not enough. I'm still getting a lot of problems just
> refreshing folders. Modest for example crashes sometimes when the
> refresh of the Inbox finishes, and some other times the list of headers
> shows every header as "Invalid" sometimes or "Expunged" some others.
> This last effect was seen in the tny-demoui as well.

The "Invalid" and "Expunged" items are an expected side effect. 

The problem is that the IMAP server can't offer me the envelopes of
items between x and y, only the envelopes between 1 and * can be
returned (which means all items).

Therefore I have to overwrite each and every item (because the sequence
numbers must be consistent locally vs. remotely). This means that before
the retrievals of envelopes starts ... the original stack of locally
stored envelopes is purged.

This purge is implemented by looping over all existing locally cached
envelope items and marking them as "Invalid" and/or "Expunged".

The crash should be analysed, of course.

The "Invalid" and "Expunged" label problem can only be solved by a
proper rewrite of the summary storage engine.

With the current summary store, there's not really another way to deal
with this situation cleanly.

But hounestly ... an IMAP server that can only return 1:* for FETCH, is
severely broken. In fact that's not an IMAP server anymore (and I don't
care that AOL is a big name, broken is broken) I seriously doubt that a
lot of E-mail clients will work with this IMAP server.

The IMAP spec is crystal clear about this, too.

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
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